The+Reading+Journal

Many teachers enhance learning by requiring students to keep reading journals, thinking journals, or lecture journals. The goal is to get students to connect what they are studying with the rest of their experience, thoughts, and feelings. Teachers handle journals in various ways: exhortation alone, periodic inspection but no reading, fast browsing, full reading, responding, grading. It is also productive to get students to trade journals weekly with a peer for a response.
 * Journal writing.**

Source: http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/writing.htm

What are prompts for journal writing?


 * What do you remember?
 * What did you hear?
 * What was the "talk" about?
 * Who is the focus of the reading?
 * What was the most important idea in the reading? What are the next important ideas?
 * What particularly striking example do you recall?
 * Who is the target audience for the selection?
 * What is the author's intention in this passage?

These prompts will focus on **//what//** because they are getting at the basic content (though we must remember that content is constructed and so even literal information may not appear the same to each reader/writer/speaker).

Source: http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/com5a5.cfm

Students often need more focused questions to begin working on the right-hand side--the evaluative, reflective, or metacognitive side:
 * Why are certain details more memorable?
 * What connections can you make between X and Y?
 * How did you arrive at this conclusion?
 * Why is this conclusion significant?
 * How does this assignment touch you personally?
 * How does this assignment change your thinking on the idea?
 * How could you write about your new insight?
 * What other information might you need to pursue this topic?
 * How does this reading/writing/discussion/group work build on our earlier discussion of the larger concept of X?

Source: http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/com5a5.cfm




 * //Teaching Tips...//**


 * A Few Possibilities:**

1. Students can reflect here on both small and large reading goals, whether they're responding to a quick question, reflecting on their larger progress as readers, or simply organizing their reading tasks for a unit or for the semester.

2. Some of my students have also found this page to be a convenient place to create and organize links to important class projects.

3. Tired of your students losing, setting fire to, or conveniently forgetting their class expectations? Students can post them on this page as an integrated part of their learning, synthesizing the larger structure of the class with their own journaling as readers. If your students set their own, individual expectations and reading goals for the class or a particular unit, this is also useful place to post them so that students can continually monitor their own progress.


 * Student Examples**:

Click here for an example of a reading journal page used for reading questions, prompts, and extensions.

Click here for an example of a student-organized unit reading calendar.



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